markets
to develop for Ultra2 SC^I and Fibre Channel. People will use
Ultra2 to support their legacy SCSI drives."

A
year ago, Seagate and IBM agreed to merge Seagate-backed FC-AL and
IBM-backed Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) into one serial
storage interface standard dubbed Fibre Channel-Enhanced Loop
(FC-EL), combining SSA reliability and FC-AL performance. It could
become the dom­inant long-term high-end mass storage interface,
with performance moving toward 800 MBps and beyond. Like FC-AL,
FC-EL is both a network and a storage inter­face standard,
supporting Internet, ATM, and SCSI protocols, among others. The
first FC-EL products are expected in 1999.

But
don't expect high-end drives that predict and warn you of their
failure. Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Tech­nology
(SMART) is not planned for most workstation and server systems next
year. -Nebojsa Novakovic

"
Bf^^^

Igll^isHSK

PC
hard disk capacity is expected to climb to 36 GB by the year 2000.

plans
to use the technology in the future. While dual-head parallel
operation dou­bles data transfer speed for both reads and
writes, similar speedups can be achieved by striping two identical
drives on the same or different SCSI connections. Data can be
interleaved on a word or sector basis, depending on whether your
target appli­cation is graphics- or database-oriented. Windows
NT directly supports disk strip­ing, joining the drives into a
single volume.

Makers
of high-end drives do not need to follow the small incremental steps
in capacity seen in IDE drives. Instead of 2.1 GB, 2.5 GB, 3.2 GB,
4.3 GB, etc., the high-end arena has the simple capacity-dou­bling
rule: 2.2 GB, 4.5 GB, and 9 GB. The 18-GB Quantum Atlas III is
presently the highest-capacity 3.5-inch drive.

UltraSCSI,
in its 20-MBps 8-bit and 40-MBps 16-bit versions, is now the
dominant high-end mass storage interface. Many high-end drives are
available in the most popular versions of this interface, includ­ing
combinations of narrow, wide, single connector attachment (SCA), and
differ-entiarUltraSCSI. Early next year, volume shipments of the
first Ultra2 SCSI drives with new LVD-Link (low voltage
differ­ential) transmitter technology will start. The 16-bit
version of Ultra2 SCSI not only doubles the transfer rate to 80
MBps, it also increases the maximum cable length from 1.5 to 12
meters. The first PCI controller to provide Ultra2 Wide SCSI with
LVD-Link

is
Symbios's 53C895 Ultra2 Wide PCI/SCSI I/O processor. The company is
expected to offer a dual-channel Ultra2 SCSI processor early next
year on a 64-bit PCI bus, the fol­low-on to its 53C876
dual-channel Ultra Wide SCSI PCI processor.

For
the next year, there are more design improvements scheduled by the
ANSI XT310 committee, including compact packaging, tripled connector
density, and "smart silicon." With Ultra4 Wide SCSI, bus
bandwidth will increase to 160 MBps.

The
Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) provides serial interface
perfor­mance of 100 MBps per loop, with up to two loops
connected to each storage device. This unprecedented performance
rate can be sustained on links up to 10 kilo­meters long, with
as many as 126 devices in a single chain. Adaptec and Symbios were
among the first to offer FC-AL PCI host adapters earlier this year.

Quantum's
Rawcliffe says the 1998 high-end focus will still be on Ultra2 SCSI
with LVD, as the performance difference be­tween it and FC-AL is
not so drastic, and there will still be around a 20 percent price
differential between otherwise identical drives in Ultra2 SCSI and
FC-AL versions. Also, FC-AL controllers will still be sub­stantially
more expensive, even with sin­gle-chip implementations like the
Adaptec AIC 1160 and the Symbios FC920. Adaptec product manager Adam
Zagorski states that the company expects "two distinct

Web
and Radio Broadcasting

The
World Digital Audio Broadcast­ing committee recently established
standards for transmitting data over the air. And now, products
based on those digital audio broadcasting (DAB) stan­dards are
starting to emerge. DAB en­ables the transmission of
program-associated data and information

First
DAB receiver cards for your PC will be available next year.

services
such as traffic and weather up­dates. Its most compelling use,
how­ever, could be Web datacasting. Trials of DAB datacasting
have been com­pleted in The Netherlands, Finland, and Germany.
Commercial services are already running in Sweden and the U.K.